Killing Rites

“I suppose so. And you?”

“And me what?”

“How do you feel about people with riders?”

I squinted up at the sun. The only thing it radiated was heat and light. The question hung in the air for a few seconds. A sparrow sped by us, its dust-brown wings fluttering.

“You know,” I said, “I think there’s a coffee shop down there on the left. Buy you a cup?”

“All right.”

THE BLACK Sun.

Once I had the laptop in range of a real wireless connection, I found encyclopedias’ worth of information. It was central to the Nazi occultism. In some traditions, it was the burnt-out antisun that heralded regeneration, in others it was the actual physical ball of burning gas that seemed to rise in the east and set in the west every day, called “black” because it was made from matter and was therefore spiritually impure. The Black Sun was the symbol of Left-Hand path groups like the Temple of Set, or it was a name for Jesus. It was Blavatsky’s Invisible Sun around which the universe revolves, it was a cult of Finnish serial killers in the 1960s, it was the most powerful crime syndicate in the Star Wars universe.

When we went into Santa Fe, I downloaded everything I could find. Back at the ranch, I sat on the couch and read until my eyes hurt. Chogyi Jake and Ex were in full research mode with me, and the dinner conversation was equal parts theosophy and alchemy and whether we had enough coffee beans for the morning. After four days, I felt like I knew less than when I’d started.

I kept waiting for her to reach out and point me in the right direction. Pick out a particular document or point my finger at a sentence or a symbol that would draw a line through the rest of it. She was as quiet as the dead. I knew she was in there, but I didn’t know what shape she was in. My half exorcism and the battles that had followed from it had hurt her. Weakened her. I could still see the desert of my dreams scorched. Maybe it was something that a young der shrugged off like a bruise. Maybe we’d broken her in some fundamental way. I didn’t know, and she wasn’t telling me.

Still, I was pretty sure that if someone jumped me, she’d be there. And she had to know I’d had the chance to renounce her and I’d chosen not to. I didn’t know what was living inside of me, but she’d revealed herself in the first fight against the wind demon in order to save Ex. And she’d let herself be chained in order to convince Chapin to go to the hospital. And she’d stood by me when nobody else in the world had. Until I had evidence to the contrary, I figured the truce was still on.

My nightmares didn’t stop, but they slowed down a little. Chogyi Jake’s presence got me back to meditating once a day. Or every other day. More than I had been, anyway. It seemed to help, though there were times I could still smell the dirt and cyclopropane. Hear the screaming. Sometimes it was just the fear.

Ex didn’t talk about Chapin or the other men in the group. It was almost like none of it had happened, except that I caught glimpses every now and then—when he was starting to nod off to sleep by the fireplace, when he was trying to figure out the connector on the satellite dish I had installed, when he thought no one was watching. I saw the pain and the loneliness that echoed against my own, but if I tried to approach him, he changed the subject. He didn’t touch me even to see how the wounds on my feet were healing, and he didn’t ask me to wash out his wounds. He slept with his bedroom door firmly shut. I wasn’t sure if I was relieved or disappointed.

Maybe there was room for both.

The closest we came to calling the question was a week before Christmas. It was half past four in the afternoon, and the sun was about to set. The clouds to the west were glorious and gaudy—pink and gold and scarlet and blue, like someone had slipped some kind of mild hallucinogen in the world’s drink. Chogyi Jake was in the kitchen chopping vegetables for stir-fry and singing along with the carols on the radio. He had a surprisingly good voice. Ex and I were in the back den, and I was trying to coax a little more bandwidth out of my cellular card. He was reading something called The Nightside of Eden with an expression somewhere between amusement and disgust.

“Got anything?” he asked.

“A strong urge to leave Santa Fe,” I said.

“This isn’t Santa Fe,” he said, and pointed out toward the horizon. “Those lights way over there? That’s Santa Fe. We’re lost in the desert.”

The phrase caught me. Lost in the desert. It was like the words meant something I used to know.

“Well, a strong urge to leave, anyway,” I said. “Spend the winter in Australia or something. Somewhere warm. With some sunlight.”

“Where are we going?”

He wasn’t asking about geography. From the time I’d figured out I wasn’t alone in my skin, we’d had a purpose. Just the two of us. We were going to scratch it out, get me back to myself. Make me safe. Now that I’d stepped back from that, Ex didn’t know what the agenda was. Before that, we’d been bouncing around the world like a pinball cataloging the things that Eric had le me. Did we really go back to plan A now? Picking a place on the list, and rushing into it, hoping that somewhere, he’d left me the clue that made it all make sense. That told me why putting me where I was made the world the way he’d wanted it.

“I’m working on that,” I said.

“Let me know what you come up with,” he said.

We went quiet for a moment.

“You know,” I said, “there was something we were going to talk about.”

He looked up from his book. His eyebrows were quizzical. Chogyi Jake segued from “O Come All Ye Faithful” to “Feliz Navidad.” Ozzie trotted into the room, wagged twice, sighed, and trotted back out. I looked down at my laptop, blushing, and then back up.

“Back at the condo,” I said. “At the ski valley. You said that when this was over, there was another conversation we needed to have.”

His face was smooth and calm, giving nothing away.

“There is,” he said. My heart picked up speed a little. I felt like I was going down a long hill in a go-cart whose brakes I didn’t trust. I lifted my chin.

“Well?”

“It isn’t over.”

And of course he was right. It wasn’t. A few minutes later, he went into the kitchen to help with the rice and left me alone with my semifunctional laptop and my thoughts. I did need to decide what to do. It had been easy before, when I’d believed Eric was one of the good guys. I lost my innocence in Chicago, and since then I’d put up a campaign of lies and misdirection against Chogyi Jake, hung out with Midian Clark despite the fact that he was actively killing people, abducted an eight-year-old girl and left her unsupervised in a place where her family couldn’t find her. And none of them particularly bothered me. I knew the worst thing I’d ever done, and beside it none of these minor sins seemed to matter much.

But probably they did.

My life had been picked up in the whirlpool he’d left when Eric died, and I’d been spun around ever since. Me and the little family I’d made for myself. And as much as I’d learned, and as much as I knew now that I hadn’t before, I still felt like I was listening to someone speaking in a different language.

I couldn’t go back to the cataloging project. We’d done that for months, and all I’d gotten from it were lists and notes and a sense that I would never get my homework done before my paper was due. And I’d chosen not to cast out the rider in my skin. Not yet, at least. Not until I knew how she’d gotten there and how Eric’s plan involved us both. It didn’t seem to leave me with much. All of Eric’s notes and letters were like reminders for himself, as if all he ever needed to do was jog his memory. There was nothing anywhere to tell me what the greater plan was. Nothing for me.

And, what was more, nobody knew him. Eric Heller had been a chameleon, changing to show whomever he was with what he wanted them to see. He hadn’t had friends, he’d had playing pieces. I’d been one of them. His promoted pawn.

Giving up on the Internet connection, I pulled up the local copy of our organizational wiki and clicked through to the listing of properties. Cairo. Westport. Toronto. Page after page after page. And at any one, there might be a folder with my name on it that laid out everything I wanted to know. Or else that file might not exist. I was flying blind, and I couldn’t do that. Not anymore.

I needed to find the mother lode of raw information. I needed to know all the things that Eric hadn’t bothered writing down. And, reading over the list of all the cities and nations we hadn’t even been to once yet, I knew I was looking in the wrong place. The answer I needed wasn’t on the list, because whatever ambition or need or plan had driven Eric, he hadn’t owned it. If anything, it had owned him. Just the way it owned me.

I had to go where the answers were. Where the history was. I had to find the people who’d loved Eric. Or hated him. The ones who knew.

Before I could change my mind, I took my new cell phone out of my backpack. It had two bars, which was a lot better than the old one had managed. I keyed in the phone number from memory and waited while it rang.

Some moments go on for longer than the actual time that they take. The time between the click of someone picking up a handset and the first soft opening of lips as she prepares to speak can take years. Maybe a lifetime.

“Hello? Who’s there, please?”

Her voice was as clear as if she were sitting next to me. There was Christmas music in the background, her “It Came upon the Midnight Clear” clashing with Chogyi Jake’s jazzy “Santa, Baby” from the kitchen. I closed my eyes, and I must have let out some little sigh, some tiny sound small enough that it was below my own awareness but still enough for her to recognize.

“Jayné? Is that you?”

I closed my eyes. If this was a mistake, it was the mistake I was making. I cleared my throat. When I spoke, I tried to sound bright and confident and undamaged. The last one was the hardest.

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